heir time, and that they did not grow out of the tail
of any gorilla. It is not for profane man to inquire what possible
reason there could be for the perpetuation--let alone the creation--of
such a useless, bootless race. There they are, occupiers of the soil for
unknown centuries--before the white man ever saw their faces--many
thousands of them still squatting there, cleaving, like bereaved
Autochthons, to the bosom of the dear old mother who had whelped and so
long nurtured them; and trying to make themselves believe that they are
still masters of the continent.

What they were made for at all, I do not pretend to divine. The
Divine Maker of all knows best, and what He does is its own
justification--satisfying the wellnigh insatiable cry of the universe
for universal justice. They are the saurians of humanity; and it is
remarkable that the idea of 'progressive development'--if I may be
pardoned for making use of a term in modern philosophy about which there
has been so much assumption and canting--it is remarkable that this
idea, which the name of _saurian_ suggests, should run through all
nature, and be embodied in her finest forms and intelligences. There is
a considerable distance between the saurian and good Master Adam, the
gardener of Eden; but it seems to me, after all, that this brutal, foul,
obscene monster of the prime, was only Adam in the making. He came after
him, a long way, at all events; and if geology had been fashionable in
his time, and he a _savant_, he might have chalked out for himself a
very fine pedigree.

For this strange, eccentric Nature, who meant _man_ from the beginning,
and failed to realize her ideal because of those horrible nightmare
dreams of which these saurians, mastodons, mammoths were the visible
representatives, did, nevertheless, make, in every succeeding world (for
every crust of this planet is the crust of a dead world), higher and
higher organizations--until, at last, she gave to man his _inscrutable_
birth!

That was, no doubt, a great triumph of power and genius! Man is a noble
animal, the finest of all living fellows! _et cetera! et cetera!_ But
what sort of a fellow was he when he came, in his spindles and
shacklebones, from the womb of the All-mother? Was he a Caucasian, or a
Mongolian, a Negro, a Malay, or a Bosjesman?--this last being an effigy
of man so abominable that no race that I have heard of will include him
even as a lodger in the parish settlements!

M